I think the tile is discriptive enough.
But for those of you who like to be specific ....
What new features do you want to see in Gal Civ 3?
Is there something that you want to see from Gal Civ 1 or Gal Civ 2, only you want it to be better?
Do you want it to have Real-Time, Control Your Warships, Space Battles?
Etc.....
So please respond.
ROCK ON!!!
The "comfort blanket"? You mean the "being able to write reasonable and easily debuggable code, thus ensuring that our shipped product is reasonably bug-free, stable, and easy to develop for" blanket?
Screw that. Writing code for GPUs is a pain; it's not worth the trouble for something as large and complex as a game engine.
Why? What good does it do to have large numbers like that, if they don't really mean anything? If there isn't a significant difference between a class 150 and a 151 planet, then why are they considered different at all?
Big numbers for the sake of having big numbers is meaningless.
So why would you ever want to conquer someone else? Or expand at all, for that matter? If you take away any incentives whatsoever to expanding, then you've stripped the game of any real conflict. Why fight for territory when you're "maxed out?"
Having diminishing returns is one thing, but there should always be returns. Otherwise the game will degenerate to each side getting to their "optimal" size and doing whatever they want from there.
Agreed.
If I'm going to have a class 200 planet, it had damn well better have 200 tiles.
Given the reimagining that the population/food system is probably going to get thanks in large part to elemental, having a class 200 planet may not be entirely outside the realm of possibility, either.
Even though:
I wouldn't agree with how you've applied that rule to the rest of your comments in the thread.
Also agreed.
So tell me: what good does it do to have a number where a +1 bonus is so insignificant as to be insubstantial? If only a +50 bonus is significant, then why not just round off to the nearest 50th?
Look at D&D vs. Final Fantasy. Until 4th Edition, D&D was doing just fine with 300 Hp being considered "very high" (in Epic-Level 4th Edition, high Hp takes on new meanings). Whereas in most FF games, 100 Hp is what you have in the very early days. In fact, most FF games start you off with 200-400. By the end of the game, 4000+ Hp is not uncommon, and you're likely dueling with bosses that have hundreds of thousands of Hp.
In D&D, a 2d8 weapon is considered reasonably strong, even for mid-to-late game play. That's a weapon that can, at most, deliver 16 points of damage in a single attack (outside of critical hits). In FF, weapons that can only do 16 damage don't even exist; nobody'd use them. Instead, you have weapons that deliver 100 point blows in the beginning.
Is the FF method objectively better than the D&D method? No. Indeed, all they did was multiply all the numbers by 50 or so. It makes the weapons seem like they hurt alot, but otherwise, it's totally meaningless. It just takes up more space on the screen.
The only objective reason I can come up with to have +1 bonuses being insignificant is if you intend to have a lot of little bonuses from disperate sources that add up to a significant ammount. In which case, I would say that this adds a lot of complexity for little real gain. The player loses the ability to do the math in their head, so they're less accurate when making decisions (having to rely on rules of thumb and so forth, rather than real, hard data) as well as less able to predict the outcome of changes.
Most things in GC2 work well in percentages. Converting it to a D&D-style system means largely arbitrarily assigning percentages to numbers (hell, you could even use letters), and perhaps more to the point implies although it doesn't entirely necessitate an upper limit. The point of the <10% bonuses is twofold: to continually increase the soft cap, and to, in your words, add complexity-to "mix things up a bit", if you will.
Further, I don't think I've ever seen a 1% bonus. Even in the instance that it's a planetary research bonus from an event, it's always something like 3% or 7%. Now maybe in your world there's no difference between 1% and 3%, or 1% and 7%, but in mine there is.
And as far as the techs go, they tend to be either 5% bonuses or 10% bonuses.
1% bonuses are not uncommon for things like soldiering bonuses from anomalies. I know I've seen 1% pop up on colonization events as well, usually as the neutral option. Considering that those are racial bonuses, not planetary, they add up fast - even when getting 1% at a time. Getting 5% from passive tech bonuses is pretty standard though.
I personaly wouldn't mind the abillity to lease out my fleets to the AI's for a controlled amount of money, time, and role (Offensive role, Defensive role or Escorte role) decided in the origional agreement. AI's would pay for the maintanince costs of the vessels and a significant penelty if one of your ships were destroyed (say enough to cover half of the real [amount of bc's it costs to build naturaly, not the buy it now cost] construction cost of the vessel for example) and a lesser fee if one was damaged. There would also be a "buy out" option for both AI and player, where the Owner could terminate the lease for a fee, say half of the remaining lease lengths cost, and the Leasee could terminate the contract for the full cost of the time remaining.
Soldiering maxes out via tech at ~70-110ish, so it doesn't really count.
And here i always tought Soldiering had NO cap - within a VERY high number of modifiers that i already use in a mod, that is. But still, the intention was to provide alternative(s) or supplemental values to the usual PlanetaryDefense PI only.
Strangely, i'm almost sure seeing a 160% once when i was in a cheat-mode-testing-game and every additional Body_Armors should make local numbers ***much*** higher. Heck, even AIs built some for the extra defense.
It's a soft cap.
I said maxes out from tech-as in, that's all tech will get you. The basic idea being, it's more in line with a ~100% value than any of the other things in GC2 are, as they tend to fly away towards infinity, and hence a 1% bonus is neither unusual nor a Bad Thing, as Alfonse would have us believe.
Complexity for its own sake is meaningless, and ultimately detrimental to the overall quality of the game. As with anything else, a game should be as simple as it needs to be, and no simpler.
That's part of the point; why design a system where only every fifth whole number increment is valuable? What do those numbers between 1 and 5 matter if only a +5 is decent?
That's one of the reasons I picked D&D; a 20-unit scale is almost perfect (I would suggest 25, but there aren't 25-sided dice). +1 has a significant, non-trivial value, but isn't too big. That is, +1 is a minor bonus, but still significant. You can hand out "minor" bonuses fairly commonly, without fear of accumulated power overwhelming the balancing mechanisms. Whereas you have to be a lot more careful with when you dole out +3 or +4 bonuses.
If it takes 5 accumulated minor bonuses before you have something you'd ever actually notice, then it isn't really worth being called a bonus. If you get a bonus, and nothing changes, you didn't get a bonus.
I didn't say no difference. But can you tell me that there is a significant differnece between a +1% morale buff and a +3% one? Will the +3% one give you noticably more money or the ability to build fewer morale buildings or whatever than the +1%?
See, that gets into how royally screwed up morale is in GC2-a subject I'm not sure I even want to touch.
But that's exactly the point. The reason Morale is so screwed up is that GC2 overcomplicated its production model and had to use Morale as the primary balancing agent to keep money in line.
Money is the root of everything in GC2. It is consumed by research, all forms of production, espionage (in any form), and so on. Because of that, a player's effectiveness is essentially dictated by how much money they take in.
There are three sources of money: Influence (tourism), Trade, and planetary population (tax). However, the latter is the only one you can count on. Relying on Trade income makes you weak; enemies can assault your trade ships, or your trading partner can become your enemy. And influence can be fought against. But more importantly, influence comes from high populations to begin with, so it's a natural outgrowth of taxes.
The only frictional force against high populations and high taxes is morale. However, morale is used for both. high taxes lowers planetary morale. High populations lower planetary morale. Because one single factor is doing double duty, and because money is so important (and therefore it is vital that out-of-control income is not possible) the equations regarding planetary morale had to be complicated.
Taxes and populations have to influence morale, and they must do so in a complex, non-linear fashion. This is because morale buildings provide linear quantities of morale. So it would be too easy to cancel out a linear function with another linear function. Each farm, each percentage of taxes, would simply necessitate some set number of morale buildings.
This was part of the thinking behind my idea to remove population altogether.
No, the reason morale is screwed up is because your VRC which gives 40% morale only gives 4% when you have 25B pop on the planet, and perhaps more to the point, your people aren't any more pissed off about having 100B pop on the planet than 25B pop. Add to this the morale cap at 100 (after the aforementioned depreciation, at least) to civ ability morale introduced in DA, and you've got a recipe for disaster.
Exactly.
I'm curious: With all of the things you want(ed) to remove, why don't you just code up your own game?
Whoa! I go to school for six hours, and when I come back there's a small army replying to various posts! I will try to get through these one @ a time:
on my PQ nubers: Originally, I wanted to have big #s because I thought it looked cool. Now I realize that there is a second , physical improvement: most PQ bonuses are in the 5-10% range. If you apply this bonus to a planet that is less than class 10, it is rounded off and disappears. With bigger numbers, it is not rounded off, and you can see the bonus.
on my diminishing-returns theory: I am well aware of the fact that it makes expanding a big drain on your treasury, more so than you would have if you stayed put. However, this does not mean there is no incentive to expand. The encentive to expand is to WIN THE GAME. As you get progressively closer to winning, it gets progressively harder. Thye exponential thing, now that I think about it w/o English papers competing for my attention, would quickly become so crippling that no-one COULD ever expand. However, a slightly less potent increase would do the job quite nicely, I think.
on % vs. numerical: It might be nice to see a balance of the two: numerical bonuses to start races out when %s would be less effective, and then %s when races are bigger and need to be kept in check lest they dominate the galaxy too easily.
on game complexity: If you remove all compexity, you get Pong. If you add too much, you get a headache and nothing more. It's not about either extreme here, but about finding the appropriate balance to make the game enjoyable.
on morale & pop: The morale imp system appears to function linearly, but the farm and pop system appears to wourk on some non-linear system. If this does not satisfy you, you could always just have morale imps cost a LOT more than farms and pop buildings.
Yes, and the reason behind making those choices, as I outlined, was because of the overcomplicated production model and the use of morale as the money balancing agent. If they used a simpler, more reasonable, production model, they wouldn't have had to have all of those arbitrary functions and so forth.
They designed the game by deciding what mechanics they wanted first, then balanced the mechanics with arbitrary functions and such that act as limiters. This is as opposed to trying out a set of mechanics, see if they're balanced, and if not, change the mechanics themselves, rather than just adding arbitrary functions and such.
Then change the bonuses themselves. Further, with your suggestion, there would be no difference: a 5% PQ bonus on a class 50 planet might still not result in an extra tile.
I don't care if a planet is a 50 or a 51; what matters is what gameplay effect that has. Does a 51 planet provide something significant a 50 does not? If so, then fine (though I don't know how you're going to make that work for a 200-point system). Otherwise, there's simply no point to having that fine a gradation.
Basically, it works like this: how much money would you be willing to stop and pick up off of the ground? A penny? A quarter? A dollar bill? How much generally depends on how much money they already have. A person who counts their wealth in the millions can't really be bothered to pick up that dollar bill; that's a rounding error to him. A person living paycheck to paycheck may stop to pick up that dollar, but the penny might be entirely inconsequential to him.
Only in a conquest victory. It'd be better to go for any of the alternate victory conditions.
I would remind you that there are other games than GC2. Some of them have tried what you're suggesting (CivIII in particular) and they were not well received because of it.
About Soldiering, i feel there is a distinction to be made before anyone introduces "better solutions" for it; Ability and Bonus and if the defensive 'amounts' balance can match whatever advantages higher soldiering values can give us.
Even i got trapped waaaaayyyy off the reasonable interaction between the two concepts since i had actually overcharged the defensive principles with almost impossible odds as far as Invasion is concerned while stacking up insufficient values to Soldiering, somehow.
One new TradeGoods here (Small Launchers weaponry, in fact), another there with 15% or 25% hikes in Soldiering Ability (which i prefer to call Skills, btw) and i had created a Monster... that only tricky *OneperPlanet* PI could nearly solve.
Lesson being that the actual default gameplay balance coded by SD is ALREADY pretty much perfect but it simply was a matter of spicing things up a bit with mod stuff.
As to resetting the clocks to Zero hour for a GC3 game, i can only fantasize about tactical choices any dev MUST design to recreate another challenging ruleset or at least, close enough to keep or change Invasion processing so that it wouldn't be a simulation anymore. I'd certainly control my attacks and earn results through 'thinking a strategy' instead of having dices roll in or against my favor as calculated by Soldiering gaps for each sides.
(Dunno, possibly Industrial Sector number 10 instead of 9!)
Then, what makes me smile when i get the single last PQ32 (around the purple stars) on Immense maps away from AIs?
Better me than Them.
Right now, we have a flat pool of 72 (half++ of which is NOT used by any game features or functions at all) tiles per planet. The trick is to see the whole picture of global empire amount of ***improvable*** tiles to put some PIs on each. I'm pretty sure everyone has experienced claustrophobia when the Howeworld doesn't have an empty spot in late turns to simply put, say, the Galactic Privateer since it is in fact the most productive planet = faster completion of IT.
Now, here comes the GC3 opportunity to alter this gameplay principle. I'd use a four layers surface (Orbital Defense, Atmospheric resources, Ground as usual & Underneath Mining)... read this old 'suggestion' thread and look at the last reply image;
https://forums.galciv2.com/167700
288 potential right there -- but that's only me, dreaming of true control over everything i SEE on a planet.
Sure, we'd get HUGE planetary development - and - so - what. We do this already by splitting the same context apart in hundreds more, smaller i might add. Once you know a PQ4 is in fact a terraformed (again, another feature which could use extra layers, btw) PQ19 (or more/less, depending on its type), what is your feeling about alllll of these extra but wasted tiles (72-19= a whopping 53!) that you won't ever put to good use?
It's not the PQ maximal counts, it's what can (or could) be done with anything above a certain limit.
What I am trying to eliminate here is the rounding-down system we are stuck with now. Call me OCD, but I want that bonus, even if it is reall small! Besides, I think the higher numbr looks better. And, as Zyxpsilon said:
[quote]possibly Industrial Sector number 10 instead of 9![/qoute]
The simple fact is, the population, PQ, and morale systems have not changed since GC1 which, although simelar was a fundamentally different game. Now that they have worked on the opponents, combat, and tech trees, I want to see some attention given to influence, diplo, and economics, because THEY NEED WORK.
It would have to be much less potent. There would always need to be significant gains to be had for gaining territory, else people will expand to the "optimum" size then switch to scorched earth/genocide tactics.
Uhh, do the math - 5% bonus on 50 tiles would give you TWO tiles. And the second 5% would give you THREE (assuming rounding rules are the same as current)
Morale? Probably not, except where they build up, such as getting numerous small anomaly bonuses. Other things? Situationally, but yes. Due to the way rounding is handled (really, any rounding scheme can cause this) the difference between a 1% and 3% weapons bonus could be several attack points on a large ship. On settling a PQ 20 planet, the difference between a 4% bonus and a 5% bonus is getting a tile or not.
Also, you need to consider that these bonuses don't occur in isolation. One 1% bonus to soldiering may not seem like much compared to the ~70% from techs, but getting a dozen of them adds up to an additional tech or two's worth of bonus.
Also, it would need to scale to map size, since on gigantic maps you would be crippled by it much easier than on tiny or medium maps.
UPDATE: Uhhhhh... a 5% bonus on a class 50 planet in my metric (which would be around a class 9 in the current system), would produce nine 20ths of a tile. However, it would also result in a slight (but potentially critical) increase in the economic output and morale of the planet, since those are regulated by PQ.
And what does that matter, once they drop the number of resources they generate due to the fact that you have more tiles?
The game's interface is already fantastically stupid in that it forces you to have to build dozens of replicas of the same building. To make you build scores rather than dozens isn't helping.
I certainly haven't. My homeworld is a money planet, always. It's going to have 16B population no matter what you do, so you may as well tax them for it.
I would also point out that there is a purpose in running out of tiles. There's a reason why most planets only have 8-14 or so.
And how is that better than 72? More does not necessitate better. Indeed, more is most often demonstrably worse.
"Wasted" tiles don't exist, so I don't feel anything about them.
Planets consist of a number of tiles plus some number of tiles that are made available after certain terraforming techs have been researched. All of these tiles can (eventually) have something built in them.
The UI visualization that shows unusable tiles is exactly that: a UI visualization. Those tiles that you can't use have no meaning for gameplay. The UI could just as easily have shown tiles as a number, with tiles that have bonuses being different categories. Same exact gameplay, yet no visualization of "unusable" tiles.
Things that have no consequence for gameplay are, by definition, inconsequential. My point being that planets do not have 72 tiles.
Who cares what they look like? I don't care about whatever UI lies the game tells you. What matters is the gameplay. If it makes you feel better for the UI to multiply the PQ of a planet by 10, fine. But it should have no gameplay effect.
Then tiles would have to be less valuable to compensate. So while you may get 2 tiles, they're not worth anything close to what 1 tile would be worth in GC2.
Again, an insignificant bonus.
That is an argument against having 4% and 5% PQ bonuses, not an argument for increasing the size range of PQ.
Personally, I'd rather see PQ removed entirely and have all planets have the same number of tiles than for them to just make PQ really big for no reason.
That's the point: scrounging up a lot of insigificant bonuses is not fun. It is not interesting or challenging. It's just busywork made for the sake of making things big. Did you not read the money example I gave?
I am not talking about an increase in tiles, I am talking about a new metric for measuring quality that will make the small bonuses actually apparent. The planets could have 72, or 36, or five, or ten million tiles for all I care. In fact, why do we even have to use tiles:
Have PQ be a measurement of how much development the ecology can sustain before collapsing, as opposed to amount of space. There would still be a visual grid, but only for cosmetics and to choose where to put things so that they get resorces.
What you consider it in terms of some "simulation of planetary development" is irrelevant; what it does is what matters.
What does PQ 51 give you that PQ50 does not? If the difference isn't significant, then the scale should be smaller so that such differences are significant.
The point is that if you have a PQ13 and a PQ14 planet, the PQ14 planet should be noticably better than the PQ13.
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